Along with my day job, I also frequent the County Trustee’s office every Wednesday when something interesting comes up in the weekly housing foreclosure auction. To fix and keep to rent out or to resell, every time is something of an adventure as when buying there, it is very much like buying a pig in a poke…

The house this time was nothing spectacular but was the largest one I’ve bought yet, it was abandoned and I sort of got to look around the outside of it before auction time. However, I fully assumed the brown truck parked on the side belonged to the neighbor who also has an older truck parked on his strip of sideyard. Imagine my surprise when the neighbor told me, no, that truck belongs to the house you bought!

Well, I started thinking and then looked into it more and finally came to the conclusion that it was not worth saving. Apparently it had been towed to the spot it sits in six years ago when the unlucky prior owner of the house moved in and has not moved since.

Without keys or title, it is a monumental hassle to secure a title to an abandoned car in Colorado. The easiest thing to do will be for me to call the Loveland Police Department and report it as an abandoned vehicle and they will have it towed. If anyone out there wants it, come and get it, I have not called the PD yet….

I am not well versed in Mopar history, but I know it is a 1986 model and the engine looks to be the 318c.i. V8. The interior is filled with junk (just like the house was), as well as the bed under the shell.

It seems like it has lived a somewhat hard life with a few knocks along the way, but still looks somewhat rugged and handsome. I could visualize it cruising down a graveled county road with a dust plume behind it, maybe some Glen Campbell on the tapedeck…

I believe the color is Walnut Brown Metallic Clearcoat, it’s actually a color I could see making a comeback. I thought the truck would smell bad with all the stuff in it, but the door was unlocked and it just smells like old American vehicle, not bad, certainly better than the house!

The shell is an older aluminum (?) one, it has a couple of small holes but seems to be keeping the rain out. There is not really any rust on the truck, Colorado is fairly kind to cars and does not use salt on the roads.

Anyway, I guess I need to get it hauled away sooner or later, it’s kind of a shame but not a project I can tackle now…well, the truck maybe, but not the local government paperwork to make it mine.

18 Comments

Kind of a shame. Looks to have a lot of life left in it, if you’re not fussy about the wrinkles in the body. Judging from the 8-bolt hubs, it’s probably a RAM250 or RAM350, and I see a frame-mount hitch and trailer brake controller too.

Can’t you post it for sale in the classifieds as “no title — for parts only” and get a few bucks for it?

It’s definitely a 250–I don’t know if there were non-dually 350 regular cabs back in ’86. There sure as hell weren’t any crew cabs–dropped for that year–or any Club cabs–dropped in ’82, then brought back in ’91–so it seems there were only 4 or 5 different models offered by Dodge that year:
150 short bed
150 long bed (most common)
250
350 single?
350 dually

How does Colorado get by without salt or other compounds that rot cars? In neighboring Nebraska, we use plenty of stuff that is just terrible on cars, not to mention that dragging it on to your driveway and garage floor eats away at those as well.

We’ve even gone to spreading some sort of de-icer in advance of storms. Occasionally, the storm does not amount to anything, and your vehicle gets a bonus dousing in chemicals. A lovely white crust forms all over the underbody, frame, and lower body of your ride.

I think the DOT uses Magnesium Chloride which is not great either, but seems to not rot the cars as much as other places. Around town here we pre-de-ice as well which does seem to help but does not seem to give me the white crust. It is actually kind of slippery which is annoying, in at least one of the cars there are a couple of fast left turn corners where the car “skates” a bit when it’s on the ground without snow or ice or rain.

Mountain snow areas of California also use no ice melting chemicals. The runoff would violate our environmental laws, no doubt. We are mandated to use chains instead. A 4×4 with 5/32 or more of snow tire tread is also legal, provided chains for at least one axle are also in the vehicle.

Yeah, but after many years of living there I recall the CHP will shut down the highway for hours if not days at a time for stuff that a Vermonter in a 30year old Caprice with bald tires wouldn’t even lift off the throttle for…I guess it keeps the Range Rovers on 22’s out of the ditches. 🙂

They do that pre-treatment here also, I think they spray beet juice on the roads if a storm is predicted. We don’t actually get that much snow here so a lot of it is wasted. Actually ice is a bigger problem for us than snow; for ice they use either calcium chloride or good old sodium chloride. Newer vehicles aren’t as effected by this as cars of the past; 30 years ago it was common to see 3 year old vehicles starting to rust through.

It is too bad you don’t live in Kentucky. It is easy to get a salvage title on an older car and this would allow you to license and drive it on the street. The down side of this is that a lot of stolen cars get routed through the Commonwealth where they acquire a “clean” title and then get sold somewhere else.

It was towed into the spot 6years ago, I’m guessing something major is wrong with it. The guy was a carpenter and fairly handy judging by some of the work done in the house. I don’t really have much desire to actually speak with someone who was made to leave their home. (not anything against them since it was most likely an unfortunate circumstance but not everyone is happy about walking away from their residence). But yeah, maybe I’ll try to track him down, his name is on dozens of documents left in the truck…

I like the styling of the ’86 thru ’90 Dodge full-size pickups and miss the clean, purposefull grille they had back then. Seems like the mini-Kenworth look that came in 1993 and has remained thru today is an affectation in comparison.